ISIS Eschatology, The Final Battle

Many Muslims anticipate that the end of days is here, or will be here soon. In a 2012 Pew Poll, in most of the countries surveyed in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, half or more Muslims believe that they will personally witness the appearance of Mahdi. [In Islamic eschatology the messianic figure known as Mahdi (the guided one) will appear before the Day of Judgement.] This expectation is most common in Afghanistan (83%), followed by Iraq (72%), Tunisia (67%) and Malaysia (62%).

Historically, narratives of the apocalypse have occupied a relatively marginal role in Sunni Islam, as distinct from Shi’ism. For Sunnis, the Mahdi is not here yet. But for most Shi’ites, He has already been born, but is now hidden and when he reveals himself, justice will prevail. The 1979 Iran Revolution is considered by some Shi’ites to be an early sign of Mahdi appearance. For some Sunni sects and almost all Shi’ites, the Mahdi role in part is, to end the disunity of the Muslim community and to prepare for the second coming of Jesus Christ, who is understood to be a prophet of Islam.

Jean Pierre Filiu, an expert on Islamic eschatology, observes that popular pamphlets and tracts, colored with superstition have always circulated but until recently, their impact on political and theological thinking was nil among Sunnis. A conscious effort to connect these narratives to current events can be traced to at least 1980s, when Abdullah Azzam, an architect of modern jihad, argued that Muslims should join the jihad in Afghanistan, which he considered to be a sign that the “end times” were imminent.

For years, Al Qaeda invoked apocalyptic predictions in both its internal and external messaging, by using the name ‘Khorasan’; a region that includes parts of Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan, from which it is prophesied the Mahdi will emerge alongside an army, bearing “black flags”. Internal Al Qaeda documents and communiques from Bin Laden, often listed his location as Khorasan, and more recently an Al Qaeda cell in Syria adopted this name.

ISIS has begun to evoke the apocalyptic tradition much more explicitly, through actions as well as words. Thus, ISIS has captured Dabiq, a town understood in some versions of the Islamic narrative, to be a possible location for the final apocalyptic battle, and declared its intent to conquer Istanbul (Constantinople) in keeping with the prophecy.

For ISIS and Al Qaeda before it, an important feature of the narrative is the expectation of sectarian war. The early Islamic apocalyptic prophecies are intrinsically sectarian because they arose from similar sectarian conflicts in early Islam, waged in Iraq and Levant. As such, they resonate powerfully in today’s sectarian civil wars.

Hassan Abbas, an expert on jihadi movements, observes that ISIS is trying to deliberately instigate a war between Sunnis and Shi’a, in the belief that a sectarian war would be a sign that the final times have arrived. In the eschatological literature, there is reference to crisis in Syria and massacre of Kurds. This is why Kobane and Jarabulus is important. ISIS is exploiting these apocalyptic expectations to the fullest. 

While Muslim Apocalyptic thought is diverse and complex, most narratives contain some elements that would be easily recognized by Christians and Jews. “At an undetermined time in the future, the world will end; a messianic figure will return to earth; God will pass judgement on all people justly relegating some to heaven and some to hell.”

Considerable diversity exists however, in writings about what will precede this final judgement. Because the Qur’an is not an apocalyptic book, writers have been forced to turn to supplementary materials, including the words (hadiths) attributed to Prophet Muhammad. The events in this period are described as “Lesser Signs of the Hour” and “Greater Signs of the Hour”. The lesser signs are moral, cultural, political, religious and natural events designed to warn humanity that the end is near, and to bring people into a state of repentance. These signs tend to be quite general that it is possible to find indicators of them in any modern society. (e.g. crimes, natural disasters, etc.)

The Greater Signs by contrast, offer a more detailed account of the final days and while there is considerable variation among those stories, a few elements are consistent.

Constantinople will be conquered by Muslims,

·       The Antichrist will appear and travel to Jerusalem,

·       A messianic figure (in some instances he is Jesus, and in some others he is Mahdi) will come to earth, kill Antichrist and convert masses into Islam.

·       The world’s non-Muslim territories will be conquered.

Many contemporary writers concerned with the apocalypse, resent the suggestion that they are somehow affiliated with or participating in terrorist violence. It would be naïve to deny the increasing role that this literature has played in contemporary jihad. ISIS is using apocalyptic expectation as a key part of its appeal. A Sunni Muslim told Reuters on April 2015; “If you think all these Mujahideen came across the world to fight Assad, you are mistaken. They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war He promised. It is the Grand Battle.”

 Another purported sign is the pro-Assad Hezbollah’s movement into Syria, with their ‘yellow flags’. Rohullah Hosseinian, an Iranian cleric and Member of Parliament explained; “As Imam Sadiq has stated, when the forces with yellow flags fight anti-Shi’ites in Damascus and Iranian forces join them, this is a prelude and a sign of the Coming of His Holiness.”

The New York Times interviewed dozens of Tunisian youth who are disproportionately represented among foreign fighters with ISIS, and found that the messianic expectation was part of the appeal. Almost none of the interviewers believed that ISIS was involved in mass killings or beheadings, claiming that the videos were manufactured by the West. All of the youth viewed the existing Arab governments as autocratic and corrupt. They complained that there were no pure scholars of Islam whose views were untainted by politics or allegiance to some form of earthly power; but at the same time noted that, the absence of uncorrupt Islam Scholars could be yet another sign of the incoming apocalypse. All of the interviewed youth praised Baghdadi for declaring him as Caliph of The Muslims, a title longed and awaited by them.

An important figure for Jihad, Abu Musab Al Suri’s book “A Call to a Global Islamic Resistance” is not only a template for Muslims’ individual Jihad, but also contains many pages of apocalyptic predictions. For prominent analysts; this book (translated and published in English with the title of “Your Path to Jihad”) was meant to attract a very wide readership of ordinary Muslims, not just committed Salafis. Al Suri proposes a distributed network model of decentralized resistance that reflects and responds to the aspirations of ordinary Muslims.

In the summer of 2014, ISIS fought to capture Dabiq, a Syrian town close to Turkish border, and released the first issue of its English-language magazine, called Dabiq in July. Its editors explained that they anticipate Dabiq will play a historical role in the period leading to the Final Day, but first it was necessary to ‘purify’ the town and to raise the ‘proposed black flags’ of the Caliphate there. Now that allied forces have entered the battle, the jihadists anticipate that the final battle in Dabiq is drawing near, and both Shi’a and Sunni groups hope to achieve the privilege of destroying the infidels.

But why is ISIS’s obsession with the end of the world so important for us to understand?

For one thing, violent apocalyptic groups tend to see themselves as participants of a cosmic war between good and evil, in which ordinary moral rules do not apply. Most terrorist groups worry about offending their human audience with acts of violence that are too extreme. [This was true even for Bin Laden and Al Qaeda Central, who withdrew their support for the Algerian terror group GIA and admonished Zarqawi’s AQI for their violence against Muslims.] But violent apocalyptic groups are not inhibited with the possibility of offending their followers because they see themselves as participants of the ‘ultimate battle’. Their actions also, are significantly harder to predict, then any other politically motivated terror groups. The logic of ISIS is heavily influenced by its understanding of prophecy and military strategic value of Dabiq has little to do with ISIS’s desire for a confrontation advantage there. 

While most new religious movements of apocalyptic prophecy are not violent, the deliberate inculcation of apocalyptic fears often precedes violence. Two types of violence can occur: violence against the membership (such as mass suicide) and violence against the outside world.

The American apocalyptic group Heaven’s Gate is an example of a suicidal cult. In 1997, 39 members committed mass suicide in an effort to join a group of aliens on their spacecraft, which cult-members believed, was following the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. In 1993, more than 80 followers of David Koresh, the leader of the Davidian cult, died in a fire they set themselves, after a 51 day stand-off with federal agents. Koresh had predicted, based on his reading of the book of Revelation, that his followers would achieve salvation as a result of a violence on his compound. The breakaway Catholic organization known as “The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God” anticipated the end of the world in the year 2000. Soon after adherents arrived at church on the anticipated date, the church burned down.

The group responsible for the 1979 Mecca Rebellion, a small sect led by Al Utaybi is an example of a Muslim apocalyptic cult. Its leader Juhayman Al Utaybi was a member of the Bedouin tribe that had participated in the Ikhwan Revolt in the 1920s, the aim of which was to return Saudi Arabia to its purest Wahhabi roots. In November 1979, Juhayman’s followers laid siege to the Grand Mosque compounds in Mecca, a sacred site in Islam, which they held for two full weeks. The cult was inspired by the teachings of Nasir-al-Din Al Albani, a Salafi who advocated a return to the pure Islam of the Quran and the Hadith. Albani eschewed politics and violence and the cult began with the same quietist tendencies until the they had been took over by Mohammed Al Qahtani in 1978. Qahtani was killed by Saudi police during the 1979 siege but this did not stop the group which Al Utaybi took charge, claiming that Qahtani was the Mahdi and he was still alive.

In a study that is widely seen as among the most important contributions to social psychology, a team of observers joined a prophetic, apocalyptic cult to determine what would happen to the group, if the predicted events failed to materialize. Marian Keech (a pseudonym for Dorothy Martin) the leader of the cult, predicted the destruction of United States in a great flood, scheduled for December 21, 1955. She told her followers that they would be rescued from the floodwaters by a team of outer-space men, in flying saucers with whom she was able to communicate, she said through telepathy. When the apocalyptic flood did not materialize, instead of walking away from the cult and its leader, most members continued as loyal followers and commenced efforts to recruit new followers, praising that their lives along with the human life, were saved thanks to their leader’s efforts. 

Out of this observation, researchers developed the theory of cognitive dissonance, which states that when individuals are confronted with empirical evidence that would seem to prove their beliefs wrong; instead of rejecting those beliefs, they will often hew to them more strongly still, rationalizing away the disconfirming evidence. All of us have experiences with cognitive dissonance in our ordinary lives: When we hear or see something we don’t want to believe because it threatens our view of ourselves or our world, rather than changing our views, we may be tempted to persuade ourselves that there has been a mistake, that the discomforting evidence is wrong, we may be in need of new glasses or we just misheard it. When this happens in cults, members may try harder to recruit others to join them in their views. Since then, a number of similar cults have been studied, many but not all of which followed this pattern. The vast majority survived the failed prophecy, but some employed other stratagems/tactics to cope with cognitive dissonance, such as ‘spiritualizing’ the prophecy by claiming that the life did not end, but changed significantly on the day the world was predicted to end.

Among Protestant Apocalyptic cults, there is an important distinction between pre-tribulation and post-tribulation fundamentalists. Pre-Tribulation believers expect that Jesus will save them from experiencing the apocalypse through a divine rapture, the simultaneous ascension to heaven of all good Christians. Post-Tribulation believers on the other hand, expect to be present during the apocalypse. Christian militants who subscribe to post-tribulation beliefs, consider it their duty to attack the forces of the Antichrist, who will become leader of the world during the end times.

William McCants explains that there is no analogous post-tribulation eschatology in Islam. “The Islamic Day of Judgement is preceded by a series of signs, some of which occurred in Muhammad’s own life time. The signs are mentioned in words attributed to Muhammad and usually have the formula such as ‘…The Hour won’t come until…..’ As you get closer to the Day, the signs become more intense. ISIS can’t hasten the Day with violence but it can claim to fulfill some of the major signs heralding its approach, which might be tantamount to the same thing.”

Many new religious movements employ a set of practices for enhancing commitment. These include sharing property- signing it over to the group admission-limiting interactions with the outside world-employing special terms for the outside world- ignoring outside news sources-speaking a special jargon-unusual sexual practices-polygamy or celibacy-communal ownership of property-uncompensated labor and communal work-daily meetings-mortification procedures such as confession, mutual surveillance and denunciation, institutionalization of awe for the group and its leaders through the attribution of magical powers, legitimization of group demands through appeals to ultimate values (such as religion) and the use of special forms of address. Most terrorist groups employ at least some of these mechanisms. Violent cults develop a story about imminent danger to an ‘in-group’, foster group identity, dehumanize the group’s purported enemies and encourage the creation of a ‘killer-self’ capable of murdering large numbers of innocent people. As we have seen ISIS members engage in a number of these practices. Many Western recruits burn their passports as a rite of passage. ISIS flaunts its sexual enslavement of polytheist as a sign of its strict conformance with Sharia and of the coming end times. The strict dress code is enforced in part by public shaming of women who don’t comply.

Like other apocalyptic groups in history, ISIS’s stated goal is to purify the world and create a new era, in which a more perfect version of Islam is accepted worldwide. This is a typical millenarian project, which always involves transforming the world into something more pure, either politically or religiously.

As we have seen, ISIS emerged out of an especially barbaric strain of Al Qaeda, which was initiated by Abu Musab al Zarqawi rather than Bin Laden himself. One of the reasons for both Zarqawi’s and ISIS’s anti-Shi’ite savagery is their apparent belief in end-times prophecies. It is impossible to know whether Baghdadi and other ISIS leaders truly believe that the end times are near or are using these prophecies instrumentally and cynically to attract a broader array of recruits. Either way, appealing to apocalyptic expectation is an important part of ISIS Modus-Operandi. And goading the West into a final battle in Syria is a critical component of the scenario.